Touching base in the Silicon Valley of India

The Next Generation Android 2012 conference was the perfect opportunity for ST-Ericsson to connect with the developer community in India’s “Silicon Valley”, the triangle of the three major cities Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad builds. ST-Ericsson was represented at the conference with two speakers and a booth.

The focus of attention in our own booth was of course the versatile Snowball SDK with Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS. While the barebone Snowball SDK already has proven to be usable for most application development projects, the guys behind the SRUTA tablet kit really demonstrated that imagination has no limit. (An example was provided on spot, as Linaro’s Zack Pfeffer showed during his speech a usage of slide show application when hooking up a Snowball board with the projector)

Since last time we teamed up with our partners Asmaitha Wireless, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, they have significantly improved their seriously loaded SRUTA tablet. How about the following specs: Dual core A9 processor running at 1.2GHz, 7” Display with multipoint capacitive touch panel, 21mbps HSPA+ modem with both data and voice call, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM Radio, tons of sensors, NFC, USB 3.0, 6400mAh battery with fast charging, and so on. It literally has everything.

Two highlights of our presence at this event were the keynote speech from Chawan Mehra on Android evolution and directions for developers’ community and my own NFC technical workshop. NFC being such a new topic for the developer community, this drew much attention from the audience. Asmaitha Wireless demonstrated along with this NFC authentication using ISO14443A smart card and ISO15693 smart label on their SRUTA tablet.

To me, this event once again proved that the interest in product development of devices and apps is growing among the developers. I hope we convinced them, that everyone now has the opportunity to show imagination has no limits.

Seeing is believing